writing

Sweeping Out Inner Clutter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments
Spring window, upstairs study.

Early evening on Friday, after a long workday, I’m in a nearby town’s general store, talking to an old acquaintance on the porch. The store’s door is propped open. A warm breeze swirls. Rain isn’t far in the offering.

A few years ago, a stranger stopped on the porch steps where I was eating ice cream with my daughters and said my name. She’d read my first book, she said, and loved it. That conversation: a shift for me.

On my way home, I stop at the town beach and lean against the tall cedars, whitecaps chopping on the lake. The breeze is no longer so warm here, and I have the beach to myself. Last fall, weekend afternoons and stuffy evenings, I swam here, when everyone else was too busy or too disinterested to swim at my usual places. With my youngest at college, I lived alone again, and I determined not to drench my empty nest with tears. For those hours, I brought pages of my manuscript. Dusty sand drifted into my printed words and into my bag that held my ever-present things: library books and knitting. I’d swam here before with my daughters, but I began to know this lake in a new way: how the bottom drops quickly and few boats venture to this far end. I kicked far out, leaving the weeds and the strangers on the beach behind. Curious or not, the loons joined me.

And a line from the mesmerizing Annabel Abbs’ Windswept about women, walking, solitude, and creativity: “She purged her inner clutter with outdoor space.”

‘Eat all the plums from all the iceboxes. Apologize to no one.’

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Not a spoiler alert — an eclipse is headed our planet’s way — and we live in the path of totality. Over the past few years, it feels like the state has prepared for so many things: snowstorms and windstorms, floods. Now, a river of people streaming in for The Awesome.

Meanwhile, lives churn on. I spend a pleasant and snowy afternoon writing a spreadsheet, followed by a ranting email which I (wisely) delete before I send. I write and write. A short excerpt of my novel is picked up for publication in May. I’m given a green folder and a white folder of old letters and documents and site map for an article I’m writing. The housecats twitch at the juncos in the feeder.

Ryan Champan’s advice on writing a novel:

56. If you’re struggling with revision, print out the draft. Cut each sentence into individual strips and papier mâché them into a sculpture of your head, scaled 2x. Once it’s dried, place the sculpture over your head—create eye holes at your discretion—and just sit like that.

And another:

15. Llosa again, on writing one’s first novel: “Those writers who shun their own demons and set themselves themes because they believe their own aren’t original or appealing enough are making an enormous mistake. In and of itself, no literary theme is good or bad. Any themes can be either, and the verdict depends not on the theme itself but rather on what it becomes when the application of form—narrative style and structure—makes it a novel.”

Read the whole 1oo here. Surely a few gems for anyone…

On Gaslighting.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Via email, my daughter’s school sends me a survey. The survey poses a question about what I desire for my student. The question is phrased in a way that reminds me of a question I was recently asked, by someone I hardly know. The question was unique; the questioner asked specifically about me and my life, and how I saw my life in the wider context of the town.

I’ve been thinking of that question since that conversation, returning to it in odd moments while opening my post office box or washing the oatmeal pot. It’s a question we might all want to be asking ourselves — not just what would improve our individual lives, but how do we understand ourselves in the landscape of where we live. Or maybe this is simply April musings, cusp of a storm that could go either way, rain or snow or perhaps simply wind, sweetened with the scent of thawing soil.

Here’s a few lines from a New Yorker article that seem contemporarily apt….

Gaslighting essentially turns its targets against themselves, she writes, by harnessing “the very same capacities through which we create lives that have meaning to us as individuals,” such as the capacities to love, to trust, to empathize with others, and to recognize the fallibility of our perceptions and beliefs. This last point has always struck me as one of gaslighting’s keenest betrayals: it takes what is essentially an ethically productive form of humility, the awareness that one might be wrong, and turns it into a liability.

— Leslie Jamison

“Writing is about breaking down…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

A book of Knausgaard’s essays makes its way into my house. On a snowy day, the cats and I finish putting together my taxes, then read. The snow piles and drifts. The next day, the snow melts and melts, running in sun-sparkling rivulets. Readers either love Knausgaard or despise him, like readers understand Halldór Laxness, or don’t, much in the same way that I have never understood Jane Austen. When I began reading Knausgaard’s Struggle books, a neighbor read at my breakneck pace, loving his words. She and I have long since traveled our own different lives. But reading these essays reminds me of her, how profoundly she believed in beauty as a force. Whichever way she’s traveled, I wonder how that’s worked out for her.

Writing is about breaking down what you can do and what you’ve learned, something that would be inconceivable to a craftsman, a cabinetmaker, for instance, who can’t possibly start from scratch every time.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

Cats, Coyotes.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

The return trip from my parents’ house in New Mexico to my own Hardwick, Vermont, house was 20 hours. When I stepped off the plane, I was effusively grateful to see my daughters waiting to drive me home, to wrap me again in our own particular kind of family — loving and funny, with the fierce rivers of stories that run between us.

A friend texts me and sweetly offers to make me a meal; these days, about all I’ve done is trudge into work, then lie on couch with my cats, reading Michael Crummy and soaking in Jon Stewart’s election update. When my daughters were babies, I lived in a rarefied kind of atmosphere, of warm milk and scant sleep and intense curiosity: what now? what next? As if bookended, my parents in very old age live in a unique world, too, suffused with New Mexican sunlight, and with a similar uncertainty: what next?

In that middle-of-the-night drive to Albuquerque, circling through the airport parking lot, I spied a coyote. I pulled over, opened the car door, and looked back. Under the amber streetlights, the coyote hurried along, brushy tail bouncing, not so much as glancing over its shoulder at me. Around us, so much cement, then the desert, undulating, spreading up into the hills, disappearing from sight.

The wild creature vanished into the dark.

“A body must bear what can’t be helped.”

— Michael Crummy

The Revenge Business.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Washing dishes this morning, I catch a little of NPR’s Morning Edition. Mandy Patinkin who starred in The Princess Bride says his famous line about avenging his father’s death. As I’m scrubbing out the coffee pot, Patinkin says the more important line is about how revenge never got anyone what they wanted. Ever.

For February, this Saturday is crazy warm. I hang the laundry outside to dry and open the windows. I finish up some work at the coffee shop and talk with a school board member from the board I quit, abruptly, last spring. A few raindrops are falling as we step outside on the sidewalk.

In the little rain, I walk home, thinking about that revenge line. Families, nations, epochs, have run on revenge. And the math always works out in its own calculation. Check out the NPR segment.